Good to know. My system is all AMD.
TBH, you don’t really dip your toes by just switching distros. If Ubuntu works well for you, I see no reason to switch (even if I personally have a beef with it). I hate ditro-hopping personally, I don’t really care what others do.
Being at the beginning, I’d recommend Fedora and staying away from Manjaro. I have had Manjaro installs malfunction in unexpected ways more than Arch installs. Sure, YMMV, but from my experience and from other online complaints, I’d say stay away from it.
You can try Arch if you want to see how the Linux desktop works at a high level (services, DE, display servers, login managers etc.), following the Arch wiki is not hard if you have patience to read everything and not between the lines. If you want Arch, but with an easier installer, try EndeavourOS, it’s basically the spiritual successor to Antergos (just “Arch with a GUI”), but it has a closer base to Arch than Antergos did.
But again, your desktop needs to be functional, so distro-hopping and testing stuff on your daily driver is… not recommended to say the least. Stick with Ubuntu or Fedora and if you really want to learn, try installing Arch in a VM, poke some AUR packages, let them compile and after you get used to it, dip your toes into either Gentoo or LFS (Linux from Scratch). Or, you could try to see alternative inits and service managers, but still keep the (now familiar) Arch base, by using Artix first (I’d recommend OpenRC, because that’s the default and it’s also Gentoo’s default).
At some point, when I stop using low-end hardware, I’ll probably try both Gentoo and LFS. I most likely won’t daily drive them, I’ll keep them in VMs or LXC containers (well, at least the former), but they are on my list of things to try out. I’m kind of impressed by myself, that in 10+ years of using Linux, I used to distro-hop a lot in the early days (mostly between Ubuntu, its flavors, Arch and its forks), but with my growing distaste for distro-hopping, I managed to never even touch a Gentoo iso. Well, better late than never.
I appreciate the input and basically came to the same conclusion about Manjaro. I have spent the last 2 hours messing around with it and am currently installing Fedora. I think that Fedora will be a better choice as the stability and compatibility is much better out of the box. I need to be able to use certain programs related to school and business and Fedora is great in that department.
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eh I daily drive KDE Manjaro and its been great, but I dont generally try to run modern AAA games.
It was more to do with software compatibility for a few things I need for school and work. I would have had to compile them from scratch on Manjaro vs supported releases for Fedora
im spoiled, I have a 5900x so installing and compiling take about the same time.
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Maybe one day 
I ran Manjaro KDE too. No proprietary software, for that matter, not even the AUR. Everything was from Manjaro’s repo and I was only using Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Dolphin and Konsole. At some points, either KDE would freeze up and require a kill of sddm through SSH (because changing TTYs didn’t work), or Manjaro would freeze and require a hard reboot, or when trying to reboot or power off, Manjaro wouldn’t unmount my /home partition (nothing fancy, just ext4), or systemd would not timeout services for more than 30 minutes and would not turn off without forcing it to. I lived with such issues for about a year, then I just distro-hopped, because I couldn’t forgive it anymore. Yes, despite all the issues, I lived with Manjaro for a year (total of 2 years, the first year it was fine), because I was too lazy to distro-hop. And I checked for updates almost daily, but updates in Manjaro came at 1 or 2 weeks and it came with 2-3 GB, which is insane, which is another reason why I distro-hopped.
Oh, funny stuff. I ran Windows 10 VM in KVM inside Manjaro, with GPU, SSD and USB passthrough. When KDE would freeze, SSHd would not respond and I couldn’t switch TTYs, KVM was still working! Windows was chugging along just fine, which was insane, how could a Linux distro freeze and fail so hard, but the kernel still work? Again, I had absolutely nothing fancy on top of Manjaro.
If you really want to try something different, then give one of the BSDs a go! Such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly, GhostBSD, etc.
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wow, that is crazy. I would have been just as frustrated.
I will say on the rare case where I need it not having multiple TTY’s is annoying.
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Definitely for All AMD systems. Not quite so for Nvidia since it’s a rolling release for Nvidia.
But when you’re fully ready, a Arch Graphical Installer like Calamares would be the best distro where you don’t have to worry about updating major versions.
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Lol wut? They are also two of the easiest distributions to install Nvidia on it history with PopOS being next in line?
I’m all for promoting arch but not for the wrong reasons xD
Honestly here’s my objective opinion It distribution is really nothing more than an inclusion of a kernel some basic tools and other things needed to really get the base operating system working everything you tack on top really isn’t distribution specific. Now where do distros shine? They shine out and they’re very very niche tools. What have they created or a script that you’ve created or a UI integration they have created that just makes your life easier If you find that manjaro does that which for a lot of people it does… Go for it It has one caveat. You need to update frequently and those updates are going to be large because usually things are held back versus arch where they’re just released as they come. There’s an advantage to that You have less package mismatches. There’s a disadvantage to that as well You don’t get the updates as fast as arch and you certainly have bigger updates which can break more but it’s still a rolling release It’s just semi-rolling.
Fedora is a fantastic distribution it was the first one I’ve ever jumped on it was the way I got into Linux way back in the fedora core days. I can never say how much I hate that distribution but I also love it at the same time. It goes through its ups and downs and be aware that sometimes fedora just sucks.
People’s opinions of Linux distributions are going to change by the month My recommendation is just try out what you want in a VM see if you really like that kind of workflow if it works for you go for it stick to it don’t keep changing there’s no purpose in it. What you’re doing is called distro hopping and it just kills your productivity
@ThatGuyB had a recommendation I too recommend. If you can stay away from the AUR as much as possible I’d recommend that. These aren’t always the best packages. If you can install stuff and build a package manager and install that for the AUR you’re more than capable of compiling and building your own software and doing those updates once a month
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Yeah, Fedora has a harder time with Nvidia drivers as you are at the mercy of bleeding edge. Arch is better in that you can manually select a driver and stick with it, not have it constantly be rolling.
AMD on Mesa with rolling drivers makes perfect sense though because of how differently it’s managed.
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I see where you’re saying you don’t actually have to upgrade the driver. Though on arch I do choose to
I would say that fedora really isn’t that bad as long as you’re using the negativo17 drivers. They are packaged a good bit better and more modularly and usually don’t interfere with the operating system.
Fedora is a pretty good developer’s workstation I think a lot of people don’t give it the credit it deserves.
Arch is probably the best distro for me because I prefer something that gets out of my way that I can just install what I need and want and move forward from there but I really do like Manjaro and the reason for that is cuz my parents run it and I’ve been looking for a unified distro to rule them all because I maintain my family systems remotely. It’s nice to know what I’m working with and to have the same commands ran.
So every single system is archbased in my realm of working with systems right now
I wouldn’t say that any distribution leans toward AMD as almost all of that has been open source and integrated. Which includes Mesa. Which makes it really easy for any distribution to be okay with AMD so that’s where my confusion came with your statement
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I will say that for whatever reason so far my graphics drivers have been more stable on Fedora than they ever were on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has always been the redheaded step child of debian. Debian is more stable but requires more configuration to get right and often caught eating glue in the corner
Oligatory Shill
We have something for this
I dont think sarge nor I has looked at it since last year full disclosure
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I am going to roll fedora for now. I do like what you are saying about just keeping everything the same. ATM I have to deal with Apple stuff, Windows, and Linux between my family and the in-laws so I can’t really consolidate as much as I would like atm. When I have need of more devices for my personal use I will be more attentive about keeping everything on the same distro.
Then use fedora 
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Distro choices is like religion , you choose if any which suits you. I’m probably old school with linux and other distros where the help if you asked would be either RTFM or STFW .Personally my daily driver consists of debian . freebsd13 and winders10. Debian is the most booted OS , does freebsd and Winders do what I need to do yes ? Why do I mostly boot debian it allows me the best of both worlds FreeBSD and winders in a desktop. Need to experiment with another distro sping up a VM.